A responsive intranet developed in SharePoint Online with Yammer and Office 365

SharePoint consultancy, UX & development to build a global digital workspace for 13,000 users

The brief

Johnson Matthey is a FTSE 100 sustainable technologies company headquartered in London with 13,000 employees and sites all over the world. They asked for Content Formula’s help to turn their sprawling SharePoint 2010 intranet into a cloud-first, mobile-first collaboration platform residing at the heart of the Johnson Matthey digital workspace.

Content Formula was responsible for the digital workspace strategy, information architecture and user experience, graphic design, development using our in-house team, deployment and post-launch support. The project had the following objectives:

Collaboration – to increase collaboration across the company
Communication – to improve communication across the company
Productivity – to enable users to achieve their goals more easily and efficiently
Engagement – to increase the number of people regularly using the intranet.

Our approach

Content Formula undertook a broad-based discovery stage to enable us to understand issues at Johnson Matthey that a new intranet could fix. The insights we gathered as part of our discovery methodology enabled us to recommend features and functionalities that would drive Johnson Matthey’s business objectives.

Designed as a responsive site for mobile, tablet and desktop the resulting intranet delivered personalized news, links, business unit content, and blogs to users based on their active directory profile whilst also enabling them to customize their home pages to further refine content for their own purposes. This is crucial in engaging 13,000 global employees in the same intranet.

Johnson Matthey aims to become a highly collaborative organisation and to this end have adopted Yammer as their Enterprise Social Network (ESN). We incorporated a headline Yammer feed on users’ homepage. This enables users to follow their chosen threads without having to leave their intranet. We are continuing to work with JM on their Yammer strategy, developing use cases and a roll-out plan in order to ensure widespread adoption. Johnson Matthey also use team sites extensively. We worked with them to formulate appropriate governance around the use of team sites as many groups were creating them as a “work around” of the previous intranet. This governance ensures that team sites are created with a clear purpose and audience and enable true collaboration between organisational groups.

Forms, policies and procedures was a particular challenge with this project as each region and office has different versions of the same policies. By creating a specific content type and a single library for all location, business units and departments with associated metadata we allowed the site to serve the correct version of forms, policies and procedures to the user based on their active directory profile, significantly reducing user and administration effort and ensuring the correct version is always available quickly.

The site was also multi lingual and could be automatically translated locally into multiple languages based on Bing Translator.

The result

The new myJM is making inroads in solving Johnson Matthey's challenges around strategic and organisational engagement, with news now front and centre on the homepage, both corporate and local stories are seen and engaged with by employees every time they open their browser.

Collaboration within Johnson Matthey is now easy and user adoption is this area is consistently gaining momentum, with now over 100 active Yammer groups posting over 1,000 messages per month and over 500 new and active project team sites linking working groups for better productivity.

Content Formula continues to support and enhance myJM to build on this positive start.

"We had a positive experience with Content Formula developing the new version of our corporate intranet. The team are personable, responsive and were very thorough from research through to delivery. I look forward to continuing to work with them."

Jonny Wing, Communications Executive, Johnson Matthey PLC